What is dirty electricity (DE)? The explanation from various websites, including www.dirtyelec tricity.net, is that DE results from the way various devices, such as cell phones, computers and dimmer switches, use electricity resulting in “voltage spikes, or surges, as well as frequency variations (also called high frequency voltage transients) that combine to form a complex and potentially harmful electromagnetic field (EMF).”

A small industry is emerging that offers to sell residents “filters” and other devices to shield their bodies from the potentially harmful effects of these EMFs. One such company can be found at gre enwavefilters.com. A post on its website says, “Once created, this unusable dirty electricity spreads throughout a building and even to other buildings via wiring and power lines. As it travels, it radiates potentially harmful EMFs into living and work environments.”

So is this DE really harmful? Some pretty impressive people believe it is. A group of specialists worked on a project called Bioinitiave 2012 (www.bioinitiative.org), and their conclusion is that exposure to EMF (and radiofrequency radiation via WiFi and cell phones) leads to all kinds of negative human health impacts. Their report says exposure can lead to, “loss of DNA repair capacity in human stem cells; neurotoxicity in humans and animals; carcinogenicity in humans; serious impacts on human and animal sperm morphology and function,” and that’s just a partial list.

The study says exposure to EMF and RF produces many “bioeffects” and these “can reasonably be presumed to result in adverse health effects if the exposures are prolonged or chronic. This is because they interfere with normal body processes, prevent the body from healing damaged DNA, produce immune system imbalances, metabolic disruption and lower resilience to disease across multiple pathways.”

The subject has come up in the Upper Delaware Valley because of the coming of large solar arrays to the region. It’s been said that at least some of the inverters used in solar arrays produce DE or spikes and surges in their EMFs. The amount of DE is said to be measurable with something called a Graham-Stetzer Meter, and images on the Internet indicate that some inverters do, in fact, create surges.

Leaving the RF part of the question out of the discussion for now, and focusing only on the EMFs, at least one important organization says there is not enough information available on DE to know if it is harmful.

An abstract published in March 2016 by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, says in a search of medical literature about DE, the authors found and reviewed 25 studies and concluded more studies are needed (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27066469.) The review says, “despite the fact that the concept of DE is described in a number of books and references easily found on the Internet, the inferences made regarding its association with increased risks on health and wellbeing are not based on scientific data of acceptable standard for such claims. This does of course not automatically imply that the concept itself is meaningless, but additional confirmatory studies will need to be conducted (and funded) to investigate whether DE could be a causal agent…

“Most importantly, DE should be properly defined in a quantitative, scientifically precise and valid manner (other than that it can be measured by a Stetzerizer® Microsurge meter). Without an understanding of the exposure metric, it will not be possible to compare exposure and epidemiological studies and infer anything meaningful.

“A hypothesis for a biological mechanism of how DE could have an effect on human health and wellbeing should at the very least be proposed, but ideally should be investigated using cell or animal models to at least establish there is some merit to the claim of health risk.

“Further epidemiological studies using appropriate study designs (ideally double-blind, randomized, controlled trials, but for observational epidemiological studies at least these should be properly controlled for important confounding factors) should be conducted, but these will remain to be meaningless until the above points have received further attention.”